Teen & Grow Rich

The audit

Is Napoleon Hill's story true?

This book rebuilds Napoleon Hill's ideas for you. It does not ask you to trust him. Here is the difference, with dates.

Hill's principles are worth testing. His biography is not. Historians and journalists who went looking for the meetings, the interviews and the credentials behind Think and Grow Rich did not find them — and they did find fraud charges. This page says so plainly, because a book that says it will never pass off an invented story as real cannot quietly do it.

What the record shows

c. 1908

The commission. Hill said Andrew Carnegie handed him the assignment that became his life's work: interview the men who had built America's fortunes and reduce what they did to a set of principles. David Nasaw, who wrote the standard biography of Carnegie and worked through his papers, found no evidence that Hill and Carnegie ever met.

1908-1912

In the same years he says he was working for Carnegie, Hill was on the run over a lumber fraud in Alabama.

April 1912

The trade magazine Motor World described Hill's Automobile College of Washington as a scam.

June 1918

Illinois issued warrants for Hill under its blue-sky laws — the laws that exist to stop people selling worthless shares.

1919

The Federal Trade Commission, the US government body that polices dishonest selling, brought charges against him.

Throughout

The interviews themselves. Beyond one brief encounter with Thomas Edison, there are no records of Hill interviewing the famous men whose lessons he reported.

Sources

Checked on 30 July 2026.

Then why is the book built on him?

Because the principles and the man are two different things. Desire, decision, planning, persistence, a small honest team, paying attention to where your attention goes — none of that is magic, and you can test all of it yourself in ninety days. Those ideas hold up. You do not have to trust Hill to try them. You try them, and then you look at what you actually made.

What does not hold up is how Hill proved things: stories about famous men that nobody can check, used as evidence. So this book does the opposite, and says so on printed page 2 rather than in a footnote:

The stories in this edition are fictional composites. They are designed to make the principles easy to understand; they are not presented as verified case studies. Examples of income, audience growth, or opportunity are not promises or typical results.

Teen & Grow Rich, Publishing Note, printed page 2

That is the whole trade. The stories in the book are labelled as invented, so nothing rests on them. Everything you are actually meant to believe — Ryan's race results, with the sources, every number anywhere on this site — has a source next to it, or it is not here.

Statistics you will not find on this site

These two are quoted constantly in books like this one. Both are unsourced. We are naming them so you know we left them out on purpose, not because we missed them.

The 1953 Yale goal-setting study

“3% of Yale's class of 1953 wrote their goals down, and twenty years later that 3% was worth more than the other 97% combined.”

Yale has no record of such a study. A 1996 Fast Company investigation went looking for it and could not find anyone able to produce it, at Yale or anywhere else. It survives because it is useful, not because it happened.

The 65% / 95% accountability figures

“You are 65% more likely to reach a goal if you tell someone, and 95% more likely if you book a regular check-in with them.”

Nobody can say where these came from. There is no study, no sample size and no method behind them — just the numbers, passed from book to book. The idea underneath them — telling one person helps — is in this book as step four of Chapter 1's Play, Choose one witness, with no invented number attached.

Sources

So here is the rule: every number on this site links to a primary source, or it gets cut. Found one that does not? Email hello@teen-andgrowrich.com — an adult reads it, and telling us is a favour.